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Feb. 27th, 2009 07:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickNetflix for last night was Das Boot which I 'd never seen before. (Yeah, yeah. The holes in my education are simply stunning. Sometimes I try to fill in the occasional pothole. This was one of those times.) It's about a WWII German submarine and its crew. They go out and skulk around the North Atlantic or whatever, attempting to disrupt shipping convoys run by the Brits.
Now, for the slow-of-thinking and those people who didn't pay attention in history class (where, to be fair, they made boring one of the more interesting wars of recent history), WWII was the one where the Germans were locking up the Jews and the queers and the gypsies and whatever else people they did not like and gassing them or shooting them or doing experiments on them and *then* gassing them or similar. There were mass graves of relatively innocent people. Buchenwald. Auschwitz. Dachau. (And, unfortunately, etc. There were more.) It is very, very difficult to look upon Germany-the-country as "the good guys" during WWII. Pretty much, they were the bad guys. (This is not to say that the other countries were entirely blameless. Other countries did wrong things, too -- it's the rare country that comes out of a war with clean hands. For example, during that war our happy little country dropped nuclear weapons on civilians in Japan. Twice. I was gonna say "nonmilitary targets" but in the end, everything is a military target.)
So, this is a movie about the bad guys from a war where it's pretty easy to tell the bad guys from the not-so-bad guys. (It's a war, again. People are all shooting each other. Nobody is really occupying the moral high ground because I don't think you can stand there if you're shooting back. Hrm. Does this mean that the appropriate course of action is sometimes the less-moral one? Yes. It's like chopping off the head of Lorenzo the Kind. The moral high ground would have had him live but he was the sort of thing that really needed to die.) The movie was made well after WWII and the people making it had to know that everyone watching it would be aware that the Germans were the bad guys in that war... but they're not exactly the bad guys in this movie.
They're just guys. And that, there, is the salient point of Das Boot. Doesn't sound like much, I guess, but it's a big and important point. See, they could have made this movie about any country, any war, but they made it about the Germans of WWII, who were pretty clearly the bad guys what with the full force and atrocity of the Nazi party and its orderly, efficient genocide behind them. And them, those guys, most of 'em were just guys.
Like us.
Now, for the slow-of-thinking and those people who didn't pay attention in history class (where, to be fair, they made boring one of the more interesting wars of recent history), WWII was the one where the Germans were locking up the Jews and the queers and the gypsies and whatever else people they did not like and gassing them or shooting them or doing experiments on them and *then* gassing them or similar. There were mass graves of relatively innocent people. Buchenwald. Auschwitz. Dachau. (And, unfortunately, etc. There were more.) It is very, very difficult to look upon Germany-the-country as "the good guys" during WWII. Pretty much, they were the bad guys. (This is not to say that the other countries were entirely blameless. Other countries did wrong things, too -- it's the rare country that comes out of a war with clean hands. For example, during that war our happy little country dropped nuclear weapons on civilians in Japan. Twice. I was gonna say "nonmilitary targets" but in the end, everything is a military target.)
So, this is a movie about the bad guys from a war where it's pretty easy to tell the bad guys from the not-so-bad guys. (It's a war, again. People are all shooting each other. Nobody is really occupying the moral high ground because I don't think you can stand there if you're shooting back. Hrm. Does this mean that the appropriate course of action is sometimes the less-moral one? Yes. It's like chopping off the head of Lorenzo the Kind. The moral high ground would have had him live but he was the sort of thing that really needed to die.) The movie was made well after WWII and the people making it had to know that everyone watching it would be aware that the Germans were the bad guys in that war... but they're not exactly the bad guys in this movie.
They're just guys. And that, there, is the salient point of Das Boot. Doesn't sound like much, I guess, but it's a big and important point. See, they could have made this movie about any country, any war, but they made it about the Germans of WWII, who were pretty clearly the bad guys what with the full force and atrocity of the Nazi party and its orderly, efficient genocide behind them. And them, those guys, most of 'em were just guys.
Like us.
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Date: 2009-02-27 02:26 pm (UTC)First off, people in submarines are, by virtue of being-on-submarines, not herding Jews into train cars or burying them in mass graves or similar. They're not members of the SS, not attending political rallies, not really part of all that. They're just a bunch of guys on their submarine. That's a point in their favor.
Second, the captain does what he's told because that is his job. There's a war on out there and his job is to take his boat and his men and follow his fucking orders. His concern is for his boat, for the enormity of the task set before him (There's a lot of territory to cover and precious few submarines to handle it successfully. He also bitches that they don't have much support, that it's just submarines thrown out there to fend for themselves.) and for the youth and inexperience of his crew. The captain is a good guy. He's not totally on board with his government -- I got the impression that he thinks they are lying about how the war is going, particularly his chunk of the war -- and when they send his ass to Gibralter, he knows exactly what his chances are. So, we get a sympathetic commanding officer with a lot of things we'd consider virtues if they were belonging to somebody fighting for the good guys. Point. (We really need more honorable-enemy movies in Merkin culture. Japan does a better job at this than we do...)
Third, we only get one guy on board who seems any amount of gung-ho about the whole Nazi thing. He's a bit of a tight ass, the sort of brown-nosing overachiever you hated in school. (Unless you were the brown-nosing overachiever, of course.) There are surprisingly few swastikas in this movie, for all that it's about WWII Germany. I think that's on purpose. Without swastikas, without armbands, without legions marching in goosestep, it's a lot easier to forget that they're the bad guys because they look so much like... just guys.
(Is it ok to look at movies like they're propaganda? Yes. Yes, it is.)
The crew of the boat is young, overwhelmingly young. The rank and file looks to be under twenty-five. Most of them look like they're in their late teens, early twenties. Were I the bartender, I'd card the lot of 'em. Point. (Many other countries, including ours, do this... fight with our young men. Can't very well fight with the women, because they're the soldier-factories. Can't fight with the husbands and fathers because they have good reason to not want to go. But the young men, those get spent with a profligacy that, at times, sickens the hell out of me. Do they know what they're signing up for? I expect they think they do. If they get home, they will know what they signed up for by then, but hindsight is never soon enough to be useful.)
The guys on the boat get scared. A lot. Also, when the boat surfaces (they sight in shots using human eyeballs because this is the 1940's, before phase-conjugate tracking systems) to finish sinking the tanker (which is badly damaged and burning rather impressively), the crew is somewhat appalled to discover that six hours or whatever after they first shot it, there are still guys aboard the burning tanker. "Why weren't they rescued?" say the young German guys. There is a war on, pups. Saving doesn't happen like you think it does. The guys in the water start to swim for the submarine (which has absolutely no room for any additional anything and this doesn't even need to be said because we've seen the inside of the submarine for rather a lot of the movie by now) and the captain orders to back up. And now even the slow-of-thinking know that the guys in the water are going to drown. This upsets the guys on the boat even though the guys in the water are, y'know, the enemy. (We don't see this, often, in Merkin movies about war. The bad guys are never scared or hesitant or unhappy about killing the good guys. It's amazingly humanizing, which is probably why we don't see it.) Point.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-27 02:27 pm (UTC)I have not seen all of Das Boot, but it's on our Netflix list.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-27 05:59 pm (UTC)The thing about the U-boats is that early in the war they were amazingly successful, and consequently very prominent in the domestic propoganda in Germany: the submarine corps had no shortage of eager young volunteers. Once the Allies started improving their anti-submarine tactics, that changed fast.
I've heard that one of the traumatic things for US troops on their way to the European theater was just the convoy over... watching other troop ships get sunk by U-boats and not being able to turn around to rescue any of them because then the U-boat would just sink your troop ship too.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-27 07:27 pm (UTC)Then again, the political junkie in me looks at other more recent examples of "I-reject-your-reality-and-substitute-my-own" thinking (FDR caused the Great Depression, Obama is a secret Muslim not born in the USA, there *were* WMDs in Iraq, etc.) and maybe I'm not so baffled. Sadly, the human capacity for cognitive dissonance is ever increasing.
What? Oh, Das Boot. Yes, a great flick. Submarine movies are always good for claustrophobic human drama. Trapped in a tight steel box with no escape... if Edgar Allan Poe were alive today he'd have probably written a submarine novel.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-27 08:48 pm (UTC)My preferred response to these arguments would involve a tire iron.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-27 09:00 pm (UTC)Anti-semitism is the hot new in-crowd thing all the kids are into these days, but the problem is that the Nazis gave it a bad name with all the, you know, genocide. Therefore some reason must be found to believe that either a) they didn't commit genocide or b) they weren't anti-Semites or c) they were somehow justified. Or heck, all three at once! It's not like basic logic is actually relevant at this point, anyway.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-28 12:47 am (UTC)I feel much the same way about people who claim that evolution isn't real, that the earth is less than a hundred thousand years old, and that the Bible is literally the actual, factual Word of God, especially the parts in red.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-28 12:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-28 01:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-28 01:30 am (UTC)The person who has obtained these beliefs is angry at Israel for their behavior in Palestine.
To my mind one does not justify the other.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-28 01:31 am (UTC)We just got The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price. And Ghostbusters 2.
Let's see if LMoE is as great as I remember it being. I much prefered it to The Omega Man.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-28 01:52 am (UTC)However, and I think this bears repeating, nothing that Israel the country does these days should be used to try to RETROACTIVELY EXCUSE the systematic, orderly, entirely intentional, carefully-plotted genocide of approximately six million European Jews in a campaign that was cold-bloodedly conceived and executed by Nazi Germany before and during WWII.
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Date: 2009-02-28 03:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-28 03:38 am (UTC)You know them, personally?
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Date: 2009-02-28 03:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-28 10:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-28 11:14 pm (UTC)One of the things that made the German u-boats so effective in the beginning was their utilization against civilian shipping. Not just auxilliary-flagged merchantmen, but anything that could possibly be carrying war material.
An interesting companion fact to this is that when USN submarine operations when into swing in the Pacific, they used many of the same tactics as the Kreigsmarine.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-28 11:16 pm (UTC)How many are on yours? I have 219 on mine.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-01 08:38 pm (UTC)I'm sorry that I was apparently not entirely clear about that at the outset. (Heck, I thought I *was* clear about that, actually. Did anyone ELSE think I maybe didn't like the movie?)
For the record: I liked the movie. I liked it a lot. I am not ambivalent or reluctant or otherwise less than Rah-Rah-Rah enthusiastically in favor of this movie. It is a very good movie. It is well done. It is carefully crafted in a fair and thoughtful manner to make a point and a relevant, useful, salient point at that.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-01 08:49 pm (UTC)I guess "reluctant" is the wrong word. But like you, I found myself wondering how I was going to identify with the Germans who, as you put it, were undeniably the baddies of World War II. It's a testament to the power of this movie that it allows you to see even them as human.